Contents

Creating a list of possible discussion subjects wasn't very
hard, but dividing the people into small groups proved
impossible. Chairman Steven Pemberton soon came to the
inevitable conclusion: there was a small number of topics that
everybody wanted to talk about and so the discussion was
conducted in the large group.

Subjects that were suggested but for which there was no time
included: speech, the user interface of style editors, and a
common model with DSSSL.

Note: the texts below are not a
literal transcription of people's words.

A character has a set of semantics, but no image. A glyph
has a visual appearance, though still somewhat abstracted.
AFII has a registry of names and images for glyphs, which
Adobe is using (going to use?) as well. SGML will support
the Unicode character set.

An incoming document is transformed to a list of characters
by determining the encoding and translating the bytes to
characters. The characters are displayed by adding
fonts. Complex languages need substitution tables, for such
things as mapping to capitals, adding swashes, mapping to
vertical forms of characters (parentheses `()' must be
horizontal!).

Two very similar technologies have been defined, both based
on TrueType, one by Microsoft (TrueType XS) and another by
Apple.

A `fontset' is not only a collection of fonts, but it also
includes substitution tables. Substitution tables and
character maps could be pointed to by a URL. A logical font
is a font created from several physical fonts plus a set of
parameters,

The style sheet needs to have a charset as well, since it
includes strings (generated text). The font names may have
to be internationalized as well, so they may need to be
strings rather than keywords. The default charset could be
UTF-8; or is it better to have the same default as HTML:
8859-1?

Delivery

David:

The same font should have the same width on all platforms,
measured in some device-independent units. For the most common
fonts (Times, Helvetica) that is currently not the case. The
Consortium might create/acquire some PD fonts. We need this in
level 1, really. I know of some Truetype fonts that are
on offer.

Håkon:

We would need them on X as well.

William:

What is the price?

David:

Affordable, I could buy them myself. We need good hinted
versions in Type 1 and Speedo (for X) besides
Truetype.

Thomas:

Is there correspondence between fonts on a Mac and fonts on
Windows?

Terry:

No, Arial is not Helvetica.

David:

The fonts that are on offer are fully hinted and include a
number of languages.

Thomas:

Microsoft might be able to spend some resources on a
standard set of fonts.

Glenn:

It's only useful if it covers math, Kanji, Thai and some
other often used ones.

Dave:

Math is currently a problem, this could help a lot.

David:

At first we need only three families (serif, sans,
monospaced), later more.

Chris:

It's also important to have something for all those
characters that I cannot currently display.

Sharon:

In phase 2, you'll also need the ability to add glyphs and
characters on an individual bases for some styles only.

Glenn:

Can we get a commitment from somebody? Font sets can help to
down-load only the needed parts. Can we convince Bitstream to
give away their glyph playback engine (called `Truedoc' or
`PFR'). Unfortunately, they don't pass the hints down the
wire.

David:

This may lead to lots of fonts, all essentially the same,
being down-loaded from everywhere all the time. A few free
fonts is much simpler.

Glenn:

If Microsoft were to develop such fonts, they can't give
them away that easily, because of copyrights.

Dan:

We can do both, standard font and down-load fonts, they
don't compete.

Steven:

Maybe the W3C can do something.

Glenn:

The Unicode Consortium might be able to help.

[David will write some Web pages on this. Bert is W3C
coordinator for i18n, Glenn can provide help.]

Sharon:

Even with known font metrics, the line breaks are
unpredictable, because they depend on the algorithm as
well.

David:

Even so, the precise size and the font quality are
important to me.

The future and time scales

Dan:

Style sheets, like all W3C activities, can be dealt with in
workshops, in working groups, on mailing lists, in technical
reports and in code.

Jeff:

How are we going to decide what to use as a style
language?

Håkon:

There doesn't have to be a single format, several of them
can coexist.

George:

As an implementer, I want to use available code as much as
possible and write as little as possible.

Jeff:

Supporting both DSSSL and CSS may be possible, but it could
be hard.

Dan:

CSS is a proposal. Who is going to support it?

Thomas:

I'll take it. But we still need a standard inclusion
mechanism.

Chris:

Could we also agree on a common intermediate format, like
flow objects?

Glenn:

I object to the style attribute. It will cause a performance
hit on the parser. [The chairman postponed this discussion.]
About multiple languages: we can have a notation attribute, so
we don't need a single language.

Dan:

The choice is what to spend W3C resources on.

[Bert has a document about linking styles to documents, which
he will distribute. The <C> tag will be added to
that.]

The style attribute will lead to bad documents, people won't
move the styles to style sheets later.

Thomas:

But it is also very useful.

Glenn:

It prevents one from having multiple style sheets.

William:

To select the style language, would I need to put an empty
STYLE element at the top?

Dan:

Yes.

Thomas:

The browser will have a default language.

Glenn:

This style attribute is a kludge, it's brain dead.

Dan:

It's bad document management, but if people want it, we give
it.

William:

At least don't use the STYLE element to set the
notation.

Glenn:

The use of style sheets requires more discipline than shown
with the style attribute.

[Despite the disadvantages (larger documents, no re-use of
styles, no multiple views, maintenance difficulties, no
compiled or even pre-compiled style sheets), the style attribute
seems too useful as a short term solution to HTML extensions,
that it will probably stay.]